One of the most terrifying movie moments of 2008 occurs early in the new British thriller Eden Lake. Kindly, middle-class thirtysomething Steve (Michael Fassbender) is lounging by the titular Midlands lake with his girlfriend and prospective fiancée Jenny (Kelly Reilly). Their tranquillity is disturbed by the deafening boom-box and roaming Rottweiler of five local hard-knock teens. Steve decides to do the unthinkable – ask them to turn their music down! It’s a heart-stopper of a scene and, as he walks tentatively over to the stony-faced gang, every fibre in the being of every single audience member screams out: “No, Steve, don’t do it! Leave them alone!”

That Steve ends up beaten by the gang, tied, gruesomely tortured and has his “happy-stabbing” recorded on their mobile phones is testament both to the power of slick horror film-making and that the best contemporary screen villains are now not psychopaths and mutant zombies but contemporary British youth. The hoody has made it to the big screen and we should be scared.

“This is a film that has hit its moment,” says Richard Holmes, the producer of Eden Lake. “It has resonance with a youth crime phenomenon that’s not going to fade away. We are probably the first film out there of this type, although there’s quite a few in the pipeline.”

The movies that Holmes is referring to are Donkey Punch and Better Things. The former focuses on a group of hedonistic youths who turn a drug-fuelled sex orgy into a homicidal killing spree; the latter is about heroin-addicted teens in the Cotswolds. They are movies that, if not quite demonising youth culture, certainly express a profound unease with what they see around them. And they are films that seem to mainline scandalous

“Facebook teen orgy” headlines and daily knife crime tragedies directly into their narratives. Indeed, the Eden Lake scenario has an eerie and disturbing similarity to the murder last year of Gary Newlove, the Warrington man kicked to death after intervening in teen vandalism.

His murder happened after the film was made, says James Watkins, the writer-director of Eden Lake, but he feels that his movie is tapping into something that’s in the ether. It’s ultimately a fear of children, he says. And it’s everywhere. “Recently, some kids passed my place with a pitbull terrier,” he says, “and it crapped right outside my house. I was pretty much standing there in front of them, and I thought: ‘Should I say something?’ And I didn’t because it wasn’t worth it. And it was probably the right decision. But when did standing up for common decency become the wrong decision?”

Similarly, David Bloom, the co-writer of Donkey Punch, says that his film was inspired by looking at youth culture and seeing “a change in sexual morality and behaviour that I just didn’t understand”.

His film’s title refers to a mythical sex act, derived equally from the internet and from playground chatter, in which a sexual partner is surprised, mid-coitus, by a punch to the back of the neck, thereby inducing involuntary muscular spasms and limitless pleasure all round. In the film, it is committed by young English thrill-seekers on a yacht off the coast of Spain, but with fatal consequences. The resulting chaos, like a cross between Dead Calm and Lord of the Flies, shows the remaining party kids, male and female (including Jaime Winstone and Nichola Burley) turning on each other ever more gruesomely.

“We weren’t trying to scandalise,” Bloom says. “We didn’t want people to go, ‘Oh my goodness, look at those awful kids!’ We just wanted to make a film that showed how it’s a complicated thing to be young now.”

Better Things, the debut feature from the writer-director Duane Hopkins, also takes a hard look at life in smalltown England, and of how disaffected teens have turned to Class A drugs to overcome the lack of love in their lives. It opens with a fatal overdose and doesn’t get any brighter.

But isn’t there a danger that these movies will appear crass and opportunistic, piggybacking on media obsessions for the sake of cheap thrills? Watkins thinks so. “I’m nervous that there are all these horrible things going on around us and that we’ll be seen as glibly exploiting them,” he says. “But I hope that I’ve made a film that plays to wide audiences but will also be troubling to them. And it should be. I’ve seen people come out of it looking quite battered.”

On the other hand, Angus Lamont, the producer of Donkey Punch, says that his movie is just holding up a mirror to society. “We’re representing something that’s already here, rather than creating it,” he says, and adds that the notion of rebellious youth is hardly a new one. “There’s always been a degree of moral panic, where older people are scared of younger people,” he says. “I think young people have always been demonised. But I don’t see our film in that category. It’s a genre film.”

The irony, of course, is that these films work precisely because of their social context, and not despite it. They are beautifully shot and intensely acted, yes, but it’s their queasy approach to youth culture that gives them their fascinating attraction. We’ve had troubled youth movies in the past, everything from The Blackboard Jungle to Clockwork Orange to Kidulthood, but this bold marriage of topicality and slick genre for-matting is startling and defiantly unHollywood.

“You can’t just walk away from our film and go, ‘Oh it’s just a monster movie’,” Watkins says. “It has a sense of reality about it, and it’s English. And I don’t want to sound like I’m being preachy, but if people discover a moral voice in the movie then that’s fantastic, because it’s in there too.”

Hollywood, meanwhile, ever averse to reality and moral voices, continues to peddle teenage delusion in the form of loveable wiseacres such as Charlie Bartlett and Juno – the latter’s Oscar spoils seems to hint at a certain kind of wish-fulfilment within the American Establishment. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Hollywood is behind that other teen talking point of the British summer season, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Adapted from the Louise Rennison’s novels, funded by Paramount Pictures, and set in an England of chaste teen kissers, it is as authentic as Beverly Hills and as English as Madonna.

But lest you think it’s all gloom, and that these new homegrown movies are luxuriating in their own nihilism, Watkins at least feels that Eden Lake offers a note of hope, or instruction, for the nation’s generation of adolescent sociopaths. “I don’t want to overstate any of this,” he says, “but it’s very deliberate that in the film the very first and the very last act of violence that you see on screen is a slap perpetrated by a parent on a child.”

Thus, in a closing twist worthy of a genre thriller itself, the real villains are not the hoodies, the heroin addicts, the hedonists and the donkey-punchers taking to our screens, but their negligent parents. Holmes agrees. “It’s not about messages or lessons or political statements,” he says. “It’s about how you bring up your kids. Basically, we’re saying: ‘Know where they are’.”

Donkey Punch opens on July 18. Eden Lake opens on Sept 5. Better Things is released later this year

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